I was responsible for much automation at a company and it grew and grew. Yes some jobs were obsoleted but many others were created especially in IT and Sales.

Well it seems the problem is procreation. All animals run into that wall.

The question you have to ask yourself is: "What can humans do that robots can't" because with mass production the 'labor' of robots will increasingly be less expensive than that of humans.

Up to now the thing that humans could be is more flexible. Robots could handle specific repetitive tasks but many tasks require too much flexibility. And these aren't even sophisticated tasks, for example cleaning a hotel room and making the bed requires a lot of skills that are really hard to automate. But we will automate them.

Most of the task of terraforming Mars necessarily falls to robotic work. In fact, I personally think that humans should focus on building a habitat on the Moon and let the robots build Mars -- at least until they've built the fuel plant, have agriculture working and have built a Hilton. We may need some humans to direct this activity but it will be dozens, not hundreds or thousands. And there will soon be 9 billion of us on the planet.

I do see mass unemployment and keep coming back to the conclusion that the "world of plenty" will involve a middle class "guaranteed annual income" that will allow the bulk of the people to live comfortable lives and buy all the stuff that the 1% that actually makes it all happens create.

As I say, I don't like this idea philosophically, but logic keeps bringing me back to it.

I'm struck by the compassion for others you display in your message. However, when compassion becomes enabling of others to NOT change and adapt, that's where I find a problem. The glass blowers, if that's all they know or want to do, could become artists in the field and turn their art into an industry of their own. There's no need for them to feel sorry for themselves because of the effects of creative destruction. There IS a need, however, for them to do what is necessary to ensure they live a life of productivity, and therefore, happiness. For how are people happy when all they do is complain about circumstances that, quite regularly change their lives?

You’re making the same mistake Marx and others made. He assumed that industrialization would make more and more workers unnecessary thus creating mass unemployment. But if everything is made by either industrial machines or robots, who will buy all the goods and services produced by machines or robots? As I said, advances in productivity allow workers to trade their labor for more and more goods and services. The same will be the case as robots introduce new efficiencies.

Two hundred years ago my father would not be able to trade his labor driving a truck (horse-drawn wagon back then) and selling bread for a house, TV, AC, lots of food and money to raise six kids because his labor was not worth it. Only advances in productivity allowed that.

There is always some work for humans. What about terraforming the planet Mars to make it a habitat for humanity? Yes, robots will be used to design the optimal way to introduce greenhouse gases, seed the planet with organisms to convert CO2 into oxygen, genetically engineer those organisms, etc. and to actually carry out the process. But humans will instruct the robots what they want, feed in cost and value tradeoffs that humans desire, etc. Or, as I recently suggested in a Mars Society speech, we could engineer the environment of Mars to make it suitable for human biology. Or we could engineer human biology to make it suitable for the environment of Mars!

On this last point, as advances in genetic engineering and nanotech extends human longevity and enhances our capacities. 500 will be the new 70 and there will be plenty of time for really long-term projects, with individual humans taking centuries rather than decades perspectives. They will develop goals undreamt of. Robots will assist but humans will conceive and plan.

In any case, humans are the objects of all value and will always have something to do, even with robots.

Points well taken. It really is an issue of market demand. Some folks will pay a lot more for what they see as higher quality items in boutiques while others of more modest incomes or fugal habits are happy with Target or Walmart. I make a banana-coconut bread that surpasses anything you'll get at the store, though I don't think it's worth my time to make it an market it. But my family members do all get a tasty treat at Christmas time!

Ed, I agree with the article but reading it was very hard on my eyes because of the light gray type against a white background. Also, I didn't see any option that allowed readers to comment on the article (aside from making comments here).

And my wife weaves. Yes, you can get more for hand made goods than machine ones. But very few people can buy hand made goods and it's exceedingly hard for it to be more than a hobby because the amount that people will buy is relatively small.

And even that is only possible because very few people are actually trying to do it. Had all the weavers who were put out of work by the automated loom sold hand-made goods as an alternative, the vast majority would have starved to death.

Dr. Hudgins,

Directly addressing your point about textiles, clothing manufacturing, and entrepreneurship: industrialization can actually raise the value of quality-made cottage industry goods. People will pay a premium for "artisan" goods. Look at the price of hand-stitched originals in a couture shop, and then look at the price of one item from a mass produced line based on one of those originals.

The point being that, if the cottage industry laborer produces a quality item, there is no need for them to fear industrialization. Industrialization will actually distinguish their item as higher quality which, with effort, can translate into higher value.

This, of course, is where the quality of entrepreneurship must kick in.

As a personal anecdote, for a few years now, I've had a hobby of making scratch, handmade sourdough bread. You, or I, or anyone else can go into any grocery store and find very good quality mass produced bread. Regardless, I can always find buyers for my bread, at a premium, when I get in the mood to make some.

My family fights over it. Orders have come in for it out of the blue. I even had one guy trade me a generous pour of Pappy Van Winkle for it.

If industrialization were such a threat, why would any of these people go through such bother when there is so much mass produced, inexpensive bread readily available?

I worked in factory automation for 15 years, three of those directly in robotics. I read Atlas Shrugged when I was 16. So, I am all-aboard for machines doing the work. That said, I also note that the people who benefit from automation are not necessarily the same people who are disadvantaged and diminished by it.

In Middletown by Robert S. and Helen Merrell Lynd, about Muncie, Indiana, and the Ball glass factory, the old craftsmen glassblowers were put out of work. The young men coming in had little interest in glass, per se, but wanted to learn how to operate the machines because knowing that made them more employable in other factories. That was 1929. Fast forward. In a class in Sociology of the Worldplace in 2007, we read about a neighborhood building that had had several businesses in it, and employed more than a few people from the neighborhood. One man said that he made shoes and now was baking bread, but he knew nothing about shoes or bread. He knew the Windows interface. And I agree that that was great for him. I get that.

However, the bakers and cobblers, like the glassblowers, were nonetheless unemployed.

You can say that they should have learned the new technologies. In that I perceive a collectivist fallacy that all people are "equal" because we are interchangeable. I learned Windows. Therefore, you can, too. More deeply, I wanted to, therefore you should want to, also.

I am not advocating that we keep obsolete technologies just so that some people can work at inefficient tasks. I only mix the metaphoric identification that The Invisible Hand is not a Rising Tide.

In the past, Robots have taken over specialized functions, such as the classic weaving example. People could then go get other jobs that weren't as easy to automate.

However the point comes when the robots are so capable that they can do any job that a human can do, or a majority of humans. At that point there is no job that it is cost effective to pay those people to do.

We will see that point reached in the relatively near future and have to rethink our economic systems to deal with a world of plenty.

I don't like some of the consequences, particularly looking at the possibility that the majority of people will not have jobs but must still live. But reality exists.